Offseason Bahamas Trip Allowing Louisville to 'Speed Up' Team Growth

The Cardinals will get a massive opportunity to both come along in their on-court development and generate team camaraderie when they travel to The Bahamas for a foreign tour later this month.

Louisville men's head basketball coach Pat Kelsey updates the media about the program during a press conference on June 27, 2024 in Louisville, Kentucky. / Matt Stone/Courier Journal / USA TODAY

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Not many people have the opportunity to take a getaway trip to The Bahamas. Later this calendar year, the Louisville men's basketball program will be doing so twice in the span of just a few months.

Just a few weeks into the upcoming 2024-25 season, which will serve as the Cardinals' first year under new head coach Pat Kelsey, Louisville will make their way down to there for the 2024 iteration of the Battle 4 Atlantis. The Cardinals will play three games against to-be-determined opponents from Nov. 27 to Nov. 29, with the rest of the eight-team field consisting of Arizona, Davidson, Gonzaga, Indiana, Oklahoma, Providence and West Virginia.

But before their regular season trip to The Bahamas' capital city of Nassau, Louisville will be making a stop there during the offseason.

Late last month, Louisville announced that they will also be taking a "foreign exhibition tour" to The Bahamas for the Baha Mar Hoops Summer League. There, the Cardinals will play a pair of to-be-determined international opponents, arriving at the Baha Mar resort on July 28 before returning stateside on Aug. 2.

While Kelsey was busy constructing his roster from scratch, Louisville's administration put together the offseason trip in a very short amount of time. He believes that the foreign tour will serve as a crucial developmental aspect for his squad.

"It's great," Kelsey said. "It really allows us to speed up the growth curve of this team. Both implementing what we do, how we do it, our system, our terminology, teaching guys how we practice."

For starters, the trip will allot Louisville some extra practice opportunities. Under current NCAA rules, during the summer, teams are limited to just four hours per week on basketball-specific activities. This includes both on-court practice of any kind, as well as film breakdown. Additionally, teams get eight hours per week for strength and conditioning.

When a trip takes a foreign trip, the NCAA allows them to have 10 full practice days on top of the four hours per week of on-court instruction. These practice days are the kind that a team would normally have throughout the course of the regular season, where there aren't any kind of restrictions. Louisville plans on taking these 10 practice days prior to the start of the summer foreign trip

"When we get to the end of those 10 practices, we get a great head start," Kelsey said.

It goes without saying that gaining extra practice time - and the experience of playing international opponents - is a major boost for any team in terms of their offseason preparation for the upcoming season, as well as their overall team chemistry. But for a team like Louisville, they'll need all the chemistry-building they can get.

Following the firing of former head coach Kenny Payne back in March, every single scholarship play on the roster entered the portal. That left Kelsey and his staff to building, quite literally, an entire team from the ground up.

Fortunately, Kelsey and Co. did a great job on this front, landing 12 D1 transfers and a high school prospect. Louisville's transfer portal class, per On3, ranks No. 1 in all of college basketball.

But as we know, talent isn't everything and chemistry also plays a major factor. For example, last offseason, Arkansas assembled an extremely talented team through both the portal and high school. The Razorbacks wound up going just 16-17, and their head coach in Eric Musselman later bolted for USC.

So far, offseason chemistry building is off to a good start. Kelsey has been impressed by Louisville's first month of summer workouts, and the players themselves have adjusted well to their new environments over that time. Even so, the opportunity for the team to get in more on-court work during the summer will help them get ahead once the preseason rolls around.

"We get back together when it really, really starts ramping up, and it counts for real. When practice starts at the end of September and in the beginning of October, we can look back to these 10 practices and go, 'Man, we're way farther ahead than we should have been.' So that was the main point of it," Kelsey said.

While developing on-court chemistry is certainly a massive boost, the chance to build off-the-court camaraderie is just as big of a bonus. Kelsey cites the "cultural aspect" of getting to go to another country, while the players themselves echoed the importance of developing team bonding in a non-basketball setting.

"It'll be fun to take that trip with the guys, and get closer with each other," guard/forward J'Vonne Hadley said. "Chemistry is a big thing, no matter what team you're on. Just going to the Bahamas and playing those games, hanging out with each other, just experiencing that trip as a whole, will put us steps ahead. We need that. We're a whole new team, a whole new staff, and it'll be super good for us."

(Photo of Pat Kelsey: Matt Stone/Courier Journal / USA TODAY)

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